The Friday# September 10 2010

Welcome to the Friday#

This week in The Sizzle: West Midlands Police set their dog on Twitter and Apple claims that Ping has already signed up 1m users. In the Fri up we take a look at this week’s London Underground strike through social media. In The Sauce, Do the Ugly Dance and get poetic with Spotify.

No specific tech updates this week, but see Fabrice’s latest blog on Brandwatch’s latest developments and improvements.

For tech updates as they happen, follow our tech team on Twitter: @brandwatchinfo

Tube chaos

So, this week’s London Underground strike was apparently cost London £50m per day. The BBC conducted an interesting social media experiment, by encouraging readers to tweet and hotspotting where the complaining tweets were coming from. Obviously, as a nation we love to complain about the weather, the football and London transport, so with a captive audience with nothing better to do – why not? We decided to take a look at whether the majority of tweets actually contained useful travel information or were just general complaints.

As this graph clearly shows, there wasn’t much love for London transport this week.

There is clearly a lot of bad feeling in the air as Londoners battle the strike on the way home on 6th and back to work on 7th. Some people were highlighting their locations but in the main, the mentions were direct attacks on Boris Johnson, Bob Crow and TFL in general. The positive mentions were people boasting of clear runs to work, tube trains not stopping at mid-line stations and those congratulating themselves on having made it to work dispite the strike or having had the foresight to stay at home.

Below, we break it down by page type:

So we can see that although the strike was covered to an extent in the news, the major chatter was people tweeting about their experiences making #tubestrike a trending topic on Twitter until as late as Thursday morning.